Wednesday, January 07, 2015

I have been playing around with Plague over the past free weeks and it is an interesting concept for social media. There are no follower lists or other ways to subscribe, only a simple up-swipe or down-swipe to either spread the "infection" or skip it and stop the propagation of the info, photo, link, whatever. You can also comment on various "cards", which can lead to some interesting conversations. I am not sure if Plague has the ability to scale to millions of users or withstand the trolls that eventually find every new service, but I am enjoying it for the time being nevertheless.

From the iTunes App Store...

Plague is an essentially different way to spread information.The idea for Plague is to create a perfect medium for spreading information as wide as it deserves to be spread, without any boundaries.Plague works like a virus. When you spread information, it goes to the users who are closest to you physically. The infected users can spread information exponentially further or they can resist the epidemic by keeping the information to themselves.Everyone has a fair and equal chance to be heard by the whole network right from the start - there is no friending or following on Plague. If your information is interesting to people, it can eventually spread to the entire world.

Sometimes we may want, or need, to listen to local terrestrial radio, even with all the Internet streaming options for music and such. TuneIn turns in your device into a world wide radio receiver, allowing you to bring your favorite stations -- even those from your old hometown -- right to you no matter where you are. My wife still listens to a lot of radio and this app, along with her iPad lets her have her music in her offices (she teaches at several universities) and on the go. If you still have a love to traditional radio, this is one of the easiest ways to get your fix.

From the iTunes App Store...

Listen to the world’s largest collection of sports, news, music and talk radio.

TuneIn has over 100,000 real radio stations and more than four million podcasts from all over the world. Discover, follow and listen to what’s most important to you on your iPhone, iPad or iPod, all for free. This is real radio.

With TuneIn:-Listen to over 100,000 real radio stations from around the world, including sports, news, talk and music.-See what’s playing live on your personalized home feed.-Find and follow your favorite stations, shows and podcasts to see their updates in your feed.

Follow college sports on TuneIn with live play-by-play coverage from 85 Division 1 teams. Listen to the remainder of the football season leading up to the playoffs with coverage of top-ranked Alabama, Oregon, Auburn, Florida State and more. College basketball is also underway, and you can listen to teams like Kentucky, Arizona, Wisconsin and Duke right on your smartphone or tablet. Listen on TuneIn and turn the game up!

Wednesday, November 19, 2014

We’ve talked before about keeping the font on your resume, cover letter, and other business documents and communications simple and professional.

But sometimes, to stand out a little more, we want to step away from the Times New Roman. And if you’re not a designer or expert in typography, it can be hard to know how to step out of your font comfort zone—without ending up with a document that’s hard to read or looks way too gaudy.

Normally you’d expect the sound of a pipe organ to come from something gigantic. [Matthew Steinke] managed to squeeze all of that rich melodic depth into an acoustic device the size of a toaster (YouTube link) which uses electromagnetism to create its familiar sound.

[Matthew ’s] instrument has a series of thin vertical tines, each coupled with a small MIDI controlled electromagnet. As the magnet pulses with modulation at a specific frequency, the pull and release of the tine causes it to resonate continuously with a particular tone. The Tine Organ is capable of producing 20 chromatic notes in full polyphony starting in middle C and can be used as an attachment to a standard keyboard or a synthesizer app on a smart phone. The classic style body of the instrument is made out of mahogany and babinga and houses the soundboard as well as the mini microcontroller responsible for receiving the MIDI and regulating the software oscillators sending voltage to the magnets.

Monday, November 10, 2014

Mac: One of the lesser known features in Yosemite is a new Dictation Command option in Automator. As MacWorld points out, this means you can set up a command to launch any Automator action you want, including launching apps, ejecting disks, and more.

Wednesday, November 05, 2014

Today, we’re extremely excited to announce Flickr for iPad. We’ve heard you loud and clear asking for an official app on Apple’s beautiful, large retina display, which makes it easy and enjoyable to access, organize and share your stunning photos from anywhere. The new Flickr for iPad app will be available globally in eleven languages.

Here is a selection of free wallpapers for your computer desktop or smartphone. Click to load full-sized image, then right-click and select Save Image As… to download them to your own computer. On your smartphone, click the image to see the full-sized image, tap and hold, then select Save to Camera Roll. You can then attach the wallpapers using your phone’s preferences.

Sunday, October 26, 2014

The Royal Society has today announced that its world-famous historical journal archive – which includes the first ever peer-reviewed scientific journal – has been made permanently free to access online.Around 60,000 historical scientific papers are accessible via a fully searchable online archive, with papers published more than 70 years ago now becoming freely available.

The Royal Society is the world’s oldest scientific publisher, with the first edition of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society appearing in 1665. Henry Oldenburg – Secretary of the Royal Society and first Editor of the publication – ensured that it was “licensed by the council of the society, being first reviewed by some of the members of the same”, thus making it the first ever peer-reviewed journal.

Monday, October 20, 2014

Like many ChromeCast users, I've been waiting for this backdrop feature since I first connected it to my TV. I've had a variety of applications that allowed me to put photos on my television using ChromeCast but this direct integration is so much better. I look forward to many other Backdrop features in the future. I love using my television as a passive information device whenever possible. -- Douglas

If you're concerned about Google neglecting Chromecast lately, take heart: The tech giant has not forsaken the $35 TV stick. On the contrary, this week the company finally delivered on Backdrop, a new feature it first promised at the Google I/O developer conference last June.

Friday, October 10, 2014

Learners and teachers have so many free options at their fingertips, we find that fewer are buying the higher-priced software. Just like with all kinds of making, with software these days you can do a lot with a little. Years ago, the costs of new software, especially those used by creative professionals, were prohibitive to schools. Administrators favored programs that kids would encounter in office settings, but we all know that the workplace of the future is a makerspace! The field of what’s available can be intimidating to navigate, however. Who doesn’t download with trepidation? We thought we should share our Maker teachers’ go-to apps.

Monday, September 29, 2014

RoomScan is an app for iOS which draws floor plans in minutes – touching your device to a wall is the only input required. Using the iPhone’s internal sensors, RoomScan recognises a sequence of flat vertical surfaces, measuring the distance in between and creating impressively accurate plans. When you come to a door, you just tap the phone to the door frame and continue. Claiming that measurements are accurate to the nearest 10cm (or 6 inches), this app – the basic features of which are available for free - is not only great fun to play with, but also considerably useful in every day situations.

Tuesday, September 23, 2014

Web/Chrome: Panda combines top-rated stories from sites like Hacker News and Product Hunt with imagery from Dribble and Behance to keep you informed as well as inspired to make awesome things (or at least look at cool images.) You can even replace Chrome's new tab page with it, so every tab keeps you informed and motivated.

With so many geolocation and mapping apps packed onto our mobile devices, it’s always bothered me that there’s no easy way to find a place I’d like to stop while I’m on my way to someplace else.

Say I use Google Maps to give me driving directions from New York City to Boston. Since I want to use my time efficiently, I know I’d like to make the quickest stop possible at my bank along my route, minimizing the distance I am put out of my way. Google Maps or Yelp or any number of apps can suggest branches of my bank that are nearest to my current location, and they can suggest branches that are nearest to any particular town or destination I input, but neither are smart enough to suggest convenient branches for me to stop as mapped along my entire route.

Apple's iOS 8 comes with a new feature, Widgets, that allows apps to present up-to-date information on the Today section of the iOS Notifications pull down. For me, this improves the usefulness of the Today pane dramatically and I am eagerly awaiting more apps adding functionality to that area.

Today I noticed that the latest LinkedIn app update adds an iOS 8 Widget. "Cool," I thought. "I'll add that." This is what I got, thought.

Uh, really? No! This is NOT what I expect in a useful iOS8 Widget. I want information, at a glance, not simply a button to run the app. They have missed the entire point of iOS8 Widgets from the very start. In fact, this is exactly the opposite of what an iOS 8 widget should be.

Linkedin, how about you show me the actual data I want to see here instead of just a button to your app. Cheesy, and useless, and it shows a certain cluelessness about iOS. Please fix this now. Oh, and any other app developers thinking of doing this? Learn from LinkedIn's mistake. Provide information not buttons.

Tuesday, September 16, 2014

Google Voice integration with Hangouts is rolling out to some users right now. Yes, this is real. Though, for the moment, the rollout seems incomplete.

As Android Police points out, some users have confirmed Google Voice integration is active in Hangouts. There are still some kinks to iron out (Android Police speculates that some features still need to be rolled out as part of Google's typical "Update Wednesday"), but the promise to send and receive SMS and voicemail seems to be finally coming true.

Thursday, September 11, 2014

When you open a new tab in Google's Chrome browser, you're greeted with a search box, rows of recently-visited sites and a tucked-in menu for individual apps. It's really not very inspiring, is it? Pinterest doesn't think so, and thanks to an internal make-a-thon, there's a new Chrome extension that aims to remedy the gray box blues.

Sunday, September 07, 2014

Lenka (US$2.99) is a simple app to help you create dramatic black and white images. The app was developed by famed photographer Kevin Abosch and it's starkly simple. To begin with, you frame your photo, which is visible in black and white in real time on your iPhone. There are only a couple of options: regular or high contrast. You can change the format from rectangular to square, and then you can start firing away. The only available editing tools allow rotation and cropping.

Weather Underground runs what it calls the PWS (Personal Weather Station) network, a mesh of over 37,000 individually-owned weather stations that send live weather info to the company as often as every 2.5 seconds. If you live near a PWS, you can be guaranteed that you're going to get forecasts from Weather Underground that better represent the actual microclimates in your area thanks to the company's analysis of the PWS data. Well, now there's a way for weather geeks to really dig into that data visually. The free WunderStation iPad app offers an variety of ways to slice and dice local weather information.

Wednesday, September 03, 2014

Here is a selection of free wallpapers for your computer desktop or smartphone. Click to load full-sized image, then right-click and select Save Image As… to download them to your own computer. On your smartphone, click the image to see the full-sized image, tap and hold, then select Save to Camera Roll. You can then attach the wallpapers using your phone’s preferences.

Tuesday, September 02, 2014

Nav Camera (US$3.99) is an innovative app that uses navigation, augmented reality and display overlays to tell you where you are, your altitude, the direction you are facing and more. The information appears on your image in real time and it's possible to save it all to your photo library.

Kalev Leetaru programatically recovered all the images that were discarded by the OCR program that digitizes the millions of public domain books scanned by the Archive; these were cropped, cleaned up, and uploaded to Flickr with the text that appears before and after them, and links to see their whole scanned page.

Sunday, August 31, 2014

Pixlr by Autodesk has built its reputation on providing high-powered photo editing online for free. While it offers advanced tools for a small yearly cost -- US$2 a month or $15 a year -- the basic online editor provides plenty of power for your average editing needs. Now the service is offering up a desktop app for Mac and, yes, it's free too.

Ready to explore Rapture and fight Big Daddy on your iOS device? Then we have some good news for you as 2K Games has finished its port of Bioshock, and the the popular first person shooter is now available for the iPhone and iPad.

Friday, August 29, 2014

It took quite a while to get here, but Google has finally brought its Slides app to Apple's mobile platform. Roughly three months ago, the search company introduced standalone apps for creating/editing documents, spreadsheets and presentations, but Slides didn't arrive until weeks later, and only on Android. As of today, Google's application for PowerPoints presentations is now also available on iOS.

Bluetooth is basically table stakes for speaker systems these days, but if you love how an older stereo sounds, it's easy to add Bluetooth streaming with this cheap Belkin dongle.

The tiny adapter plugs in via included RCA or 3.5mm cables to your speakers, and can can store six Bluetooth devices in memory for easy pairing. Today's $24 price tag is the lowest Amazon has ever offered, and a steal if you don't already own something like this.